We've turned him into a moralizing rallying call towards every war imaginable. In reality, he was far more complex than that.

Last weekend I saw “Darkest Hour,” the biopic about Winston Churchill’s early prime ministerial days in 1940, and liked it less than I’d expected to. It felt too Hollywood, too cartoonish, as best illustrated by a scene near the end that finds Churchill ejecting from his car like Vin Diesel has just ignited its gas tank and descending into the London Underground. There he asks a train full of Brits what he should do about the Nazi problem; their hearty reply: fight on! Cut to his famous speech before his cabinet in which he declares that Britain will fall “only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground,” an oration that really did move his ministers to applause and was compelling enough without some preposterous display of subway egalitarianism.

But maybe I’m just being fussy (an eminently Churchillian quality, by the way). “Darkest Hour” is beloved by critics, after all, and has so far grossed $41 million domestically, not bad for a period piece about British parliamentary jockeying. The biggest reason for its success is its main character who seems to have kindled the public imagination of late: there was Churchill in Netflix’s “The Crown” portrayed by John Lithgow, in a recent eponymous film about the run-up to D-Day played by Brian Cox, and in absentia for one of his greatest triumphs in the mega-hit “Dunkirk.” George Patton, once the World War II figure who most fascinated Americans, has at least for now been edged aside, one pithy warrior for another.

It is Churchill’s sheer capacity that enchants us, his presence in the map rooms and on the battlefields of two world wars, guzzling whisky-and-waters, setting more words to paper than most professional writers do in their lifetimes, dispatching his opponents with vinegarish bon mots (his assessment of Clement Attlee, “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” may be the best political putdown in history). The historian Paul Johnson, in his slim and slobbering volume on Churchill, attributes some of this prolificacy to, of all things, his subject’s abstinence from the “worry and emotional storm” of adultery, though that was surely one of the few vices Churchill ever managed to avoid. He imbibed constantly and was a reckless gambler, two habits that conspired to nearly bankrupt him. He was politically opportunistic, repeatedly defecting between parties and constituencies. He could be prickly, temperamental, and egoistic. Summarizing popular perception, a friend of mine once called him the “man-shouts-at-cloud of the Second World War.”

But those vices also ascribe to him a humanity lacking in his Yalta colleagues. Franklin Roosevelt was elevated into a presidential god, his wheelchair and his authoritarianism airbrushed away, and Stalin was eventually acknowledged as a genocidal villain. But Churchill always remained of this realm, eminently relatable with his tumbler and his tongue. Furthering his appeal is the mythology we’ve grown up around him, which remembers a lone exemplar of moral backbone amidst scoliotic appeasers, an advocate of grand projects over picayune squabbles, willing to make tough and even deadly calls when the circumstances demanded it. Churchill shows that our peccadilloes can be obscured, even glamorized, in posterity by the heroic decisions we make, which is why he’s especially adored by public figures. Yet some are more susceptible to his mystique than others.

There is a certain personality that longs to be present at one of history’s rare exhilarating moments, when everything is cast into shades of black and white and pragmatic realism becomes untenable; that disdains the minutiae of policymaking and longs for the momentous and big. To him, Churchill is a natural hero. The best example of such a person in the United States is Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor, who invokes Churchill so often you’d be forgiven for thinking he held a séance with him nightly. To Kristol, every mediocre potentate with a colander on his head is a nascent Hitler; every declined opportunity to take him out is 1938 Munich. The world over is simplistic and binary because Kristol prefers it that way, because it’s less gratifying to deal in the grays of reality than to choose good over evil while the symphony crescendos.

Hop the Atlantic and you find Boris Johnson, the Clorox-coiffed Conservative Party gadfly. Johnson, too, is a Churchill admirer, so much so that he published a book back in 2014 called The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. More than one reviewer has observed that it superimposes its subject on its author, with Marina Hyde at The Guardian even calling it a “psychiatric document.” I’m far more sympathetic to Johnson than I am to Kristol, but he does appear to have a blazing thirst to be prime minister, and Churchill has always seemed his model. So Johnson mutters and gaffes, repeatedly knifes his fellow Tories in the back, but all that’s okay because what matters is that he chose rightly when it counted, in his case for Brexit. To Johnson, Churchill is a model to emulate, to Kristol he’s a lens, but the common denominator is the same: a world of bold colors, not pale pastels, that forgives ambition in the service of greatness.

The problem is that, as Andrew Bacevich observed, Churchill’s moment cannot so easily explain our own. Most historical occasions are not Dunkirk and D-Day; most problems can’t be solved with mere courage and willpower. The little stuff does matter and ignoring it in favor of sweeping moral catharsis can bring calamity, as has happened with the fight against terrorism. We forget, too, that Churchill himself was chary about war as only one who experienced it could have been—and that sometimes he even advocated for restraint. In 1901, he gave a speech to the House of Commons opposing a British Army buildup because he worried it would enable those who wanted to have it out across the Continent. “I have frequently been astonished since I have been in this House to hear with what composure and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war,” he said, an admonishment informed by his own sanguinary experiences in the Second Boer War and the Mahdist War in the Sudan. Warning about newspapers that had whipped their readers into nationalist frenzies, he continued: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.”

They were indeed. Out of European recklessness would rampage two world wars that saw Churchill send soldiers to their doom at Gallipoli, demand the total destruction of Hitler’s regime, and order the bombing of German cities. I’m not trying to paint Churchill as some sort of closet dove: his foremost role was that of warlord and once an enemy was upon him he fought savagely. But he was also a far subtler thinker than the facile ghost rattling around in the hawkish imagination. He waged war but he also feared it gravely, especially what he called “scientific” war, conflicts fought with increasingly destructive modern weapons. In his 1946 “The Sinews of Peace” address at Westminster College in Missouri, which became remembered as his “Iron Curtain” speech, he struck a balance between realism and idealism, pronouncing that “it is not our duty at this time when difficulties are so numerous to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries which we have not conquered in war” while also averring that “the great principles of freedom and the rights of man” must be proclaimed. Years later, he would decline President Eisenhower’s invitation to join an American coalition and intervene in Vietnam.

Historical memory is like a great compactor, crushing nuances and flattening wrinkles until a person or event is made a perfect morsel for popular consumption. We have rendered Churchill what we will—and yet the average American doesn’t spend much time cursing the Chamberlain premiership. So why is Churchill suddenly back in vogue? My best guess is that annoyance with our current president has something to do with it. Whereas Trump brays, Churchill spoke with winged words; whereas Trump obsesses over the trivial, Churchill dealt mostly in the grand; whereas Trump has made our times perilous and uncertain, Churchill resolved his favorably. There is still much to admire in the old lion, even if he wasn’t the subway-rallying universal we’ve made him out to be.

In looking back at Churchill between the late 19th Century to early 20th Century when he had his influence upon Britain and the world, I cannot help but think of the futility of it all. In hindsight it all seems for naught.

The Boar War in South Africa. It doesn’t matter who won or who lost. Africans have immigrated to South Africa from all over the continent for work and food and opportunity but now that there is no Apartheid Africans are killing white farmers even those armed and have fortified their farms and communities like bunkers. Those white south Africans that can sell and leave are fleeing the country.

WWI was so destructive in wealth and life that it is said to have eliminated all the wealth accumulated since the start of the industrial revolution. WWI led to WWII and the Treaty of Rome let to an EU dominated by Germany. What was really gained? Britain lost its empire by the costs of WWI and WWII and couldn’t maintain its colonialist empire. Germany and Poland were in near total destruction and yet Germany is right back where it always was as the industrial and technological powerhouse of continental Europe.

Churchill may have been far more complex than history may have given him credit just as Hitler was not as uncultured insane and genocidal as history has given him credit (if you want uncultured insane and genocidal then Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro by numbers or percentages were factually far worse).

Please correct me if I am wrong in this statement but there is one area that is uniquely Churchill amongst all the western nations. FDR and all of western Europe were enamored of Marxism and its variants like communism, socialism, national socialism (ie Nazi’ism) and yes even fascism. Churchill was uniquely British in being skeptical of all things relating to continental utopian philosophies. Britain throughout history has always used its proximity and its insulation from continental Europe to take the best Europe had to offer while avoiding the worst of Europe. In that vein of thought, it must have been absolutely devastating to have charted a path for Britain thru WWII and have been replaced by socialists.

While I would agree with you that Churchill was a particularly clear-eyed opponent of both Communism and Fascism in the interwar years when both ideologies had many adherents in the West, I would disagree that he was alone in that, and I would further suggest that he was for his part a fervent believer in another racist-tinged ideology – imperialism. Churchill rightly condemned Hitler and Stalin, but he was no fan of democracy for Africans or Asians.

I would also note that social democracy, whether of the FDR sort or contemporary European sort, is entirely democratic and owes almost nothing to Marxism. The question of how much a society ought to care for its citizens (the ‘social’ part) is really a separate question from who should hold political power, which is what Marx was ultimately concerned with.

Finally I would note that while modern Germany may be the strongest economy in Europe, it is also, in contrast to Imperial or Nazi Germany, a stable and peaceful democracy which does not seek to change the European order. That is a very, very big difference which it took two World Wars to bring about. So not really a return to the starting conditions, as you imply.

It also should be pointed out that he was not exactly a friend of the Irish either. In his early days he viewed the concept of Irish irredentism with little more than contempt. In fairness though it has to be said that with the advent of the Irish Republic and De Valera etal. he had the good sense to realize that the game was up.

LouisM ,
I’m currently reading about Churchill in the Boer War & yes, the whole thing was very sad. I never knew much about the Boers but can sympathize with them in some ways.
WWI was such a terrible waste, too. And just laid out the groundwork for WWII.

This is a classic example of the odd American habit of fabricating pseudo-historical parables, usually drawn from European history and designed to promote the present day political agenda of those using them. The author criticizes others for fabricating false Churchills is support of their agenda but then does exactly the same thing in support of his! The message is loud and clear: ““it is not our duty at this time when difficulties are so numerous to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries which we have not conquered in war”. Non-intervention, which translates from Orwellian into English as: “let Putin win in Ukraine”. Unfortunately for him, though, the author betrays himself with his reference to Brexit. An American who believes in non-intervention would, logically, have no opinion, one way or the other, on Brexit. Thus, we clearly see the author’s very definitely not “non-interventionist” agenda: Putin is to be allowed to win in Ukraine so that the EU can be crushed under the jackboot of the US global supremacists. We in Europe are to be bamboozled into abandoning the EU, supposedly so as to “defend” our national sovereignty precisely so that we can then be robbed of that very national sovereignty in the interest of US global hegemony, which ultimately, of course, involves also crushing Russia under the American jackboot as well. In other words, a piece of pseudo-historical hypocrisy.

Unlike Mr. Purple, I do see parallels rather than contrasts between Trump and Churchill. It is unfortunate that TAC in general seems to have gotten on the anti-Trump bandwagon and as a result does not seem to recognize the positive aspects of the man and his presidency. Both Churchill and Trump came into power at turning points in their respective countries and in spite of their faults were the right man to be there for the times. the situations of course are quite different and so the men have quite different strengths (and weaknesses). Churchill faced a massive army only 25 miles from his shore; Trump on the other hand comes into a country whose enemy is within – a moral decay and a totalitarian leaning deep state, a much harder enemy to deal with as he has practically no one on his side except for a significant portion of the American population.

I’ll agree that Churchill was exactly the right man for the moment, and he saved Britain and therefore the West. But let’s not forget that in 1940, his government ruled far more people against their will than did Hitler’s.

” Both Churchill and Trump came into power at turning points in their respective countries and in spite of their faults were the right man to be there for the times.”
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Pretty much my thoughts, too but I still believe Mr. Trump was an accidental nominee. I don’t think he originally intended to stay in the race to win. But you know, so far so good. At least in my opinion.

Let us remember that Churchill was half-American, son of one of the most spectacular power-couples of the late 19th century, and consequently inherited a great skill for self-dramatisation. If, as he alluded, the nationalities of his parents had been reversed but otherwise similarly situated, how might he have fared in America?

I thought the best aspect of Darkest Hour was simply that allowed us to wallow in mood of sustained elite enervation and despair, something people rarely get sustained dramatic exposure to (like watching a mob of King Lears) but is somewhat truer to reality. The fictional Underground scene was an unfortunate appeal to modern sensibilities, and the depiction of that now-famous speech was anachronistically heroicized (it wasn’t at the time), among other things.

The movie did offer me one historical pause: that Churchill shared (nearly 400 years apart) with Queen Mary I the heartache of the fall of Calais.

Churchill was definitely a complex personality, possessing a wide range of gifts making the great politician he is considered.
At the core, he was a British imperialist – he lived and fought for the glory of the British empire.
If we take into account Churchill’s goals, his methods and his achievements, the outcome is not that great.
During WWI, as First Lord of Admiralty, he “created” Gallipoli – a disaster. He was behind instructing merchant ships to use hidden canons agains U-boats. This clever approach managed to have the USA involved n the war and defeat the Central Powers.
But it also contributed to the rise of Hitler and WW II.
His moments of glory were when Britain was alone against Nazi Germany when he delivered amazing motivational speeches. But Hitler was destroyed on the ground by the previously vilified Soviets. And vilified again by Churchill after WW II was won!
Churchill’s Fulton speech had an influence on starting the cold war and NATO. The alliance was described as containment of the USSR in Europe but I suspect more that it was intended to protect the British Empire.
And after 1960, the British Empire was gone. And the wealth Britain accumulated from the Empire was gone, too, together with her industrial might.
So now, 50 years after Churchill’s death, how can we describe his lasting achievements?
200 years ago, Napoleon was considered a mass-murderer by some of his contemporaries. But he left a universal legacy in administration, legislation, education.

“Trump on the other hand comes into a country whose enemy is within – a moral decay and a totalitarian leaning deep state”

You don’t seriously believe that there is a totalitarian leaning deep state in America, do you? This is a paranoid fantasy not much less crazy than pedophile rings operating out of pizza parlours.

There is a bureaucratic state which protects its own interests, to be sure. It has always been there, at least since Eisenhower. But it is clearly apolitical, obedient to the elected power, and quite loyal to the state and constitution.

One part of that bureaucracy is the Justice system, which is not (yet anyway) so politicized that it favours one or the other party. It investigates wrongdoing by both sides, and when warranted, prosecutes. And of course, until any investigation has run its course, people like you and I will never know if there has been wrongdoing or not.

Republicans were happy enough when special prosecutors were investigating Whitewater and the Benghazi attack. And recall that those investigations lasted many years. Pres Trump heaped praise on Mr Comey for releasing details of the Clinton email investigation shortly before the 2016 election. Indeed, Republicans also widely praised the appointment of Mr. Mueller, a registered Republican, as special prosecutor after Mr Comey (also a Republican) was fired – apparently for insisting that as FBI director he was loyal to no party. Both of these men are widely acknowledged to be men of integrity and duty.

What Mr Trump and his supporters either do not understand is that it is possible to be objective and unbiased. You can investigate Republicans, or support such an investigation, without being anti-Republican. Unfortunately, Mr Trump and many Republicans seem to believe that nobody can be neutral or even-handed. Partisans themselves, they assume everyone must be.

What you call the deep state is not totalitarian. Quite the opposite. But by undermining the reputation and authority of the very apparatus which upholds the law, it is Mr Trump who swims in those dirty waters.

Interesting review of the film but hard to take seriously the writer preferring Churchill to FDR when he says something so obviously hypocritical as this: “Franklin Roosevelt was elevated into a presidential god, his wheelchair and his authoritarianism airbrushed away” – um, hello? You’re complaining about FDR’s authoritarianism yet prefer CHURCHILL over him?? Churchill was SUPREMELY authoritarian & quite genocidal when it came to Indians, Arabs and Africans. But I understand those people are irrelevant subhuman ciphers to Churchill fans. Apart from that, Churchill’s authoritarianism was most certainly obvious in his approach to his domestic opposition. Amazing that I even have to point this out.

Spare me the whining about Churchill the imperialist. He was a man of his times, born 1874, and he was certainly blinkered on the inevitability of Indian independence. But he rightly knew that beating Hitler and his satanic ideology was more important than saving the Empire. It was the cowards of 1940 who wanted to put the Empire first by making peace with Hitler.
As for those who even today question the need to destroy the Nazis, God forgive you.

By the very special logic of neocon “Everything is Hitler” analogies, if Iran is Germany, then Israel is Britain, and if Khameini is Hitler then Netanyahu is Churchill. Unfortunately, America is still America, and our job is to mobilize all our money, manpower, and “arsenal of democracy” crap to go in and save plucky little Churchill/Netanyahu’s ass from monstrous Germany/Iran/Khameini/Hitler.

90 percent of the current Churchill buzz is about that, really. Getting America to feel good and noble about wasting blood and treasure running errands for Israel that Israel would rather not run for itself in the Middle East. The real Churchill has virtually nothing to do with it, ditto the real Hitler, Stalin, or FDR.

Churchill drew the map of Iraq a place the British really had no legitimate right to be, supposedly after having too much to drink. Putting those three groups together in the same administrative entity? We’re still paying for that mistake. How many lives have been lost because of what he did? During the war his mishandling of the Bengal famine resulted in three million lives lost. Picture Australian grain ships going past India to the Med where they lay at anchor for weeks for an operation he had to know the Americans were never going to green light. His famous line “Is Gandhi dead yet?” says it all.

His final action, getting the Americans to engineer removal of the legally elected Mossedegh in Iran because he wanted British Oil to actually pay royalties on the oil they were taking out of the country is again an action we’re still paying for today.

Yes at the time of the Battle of Britain he was amazing but for most every other part of his life he was so horribly flawed. And saying he was a man of his times is no excuse. It simply isn’t not for the family members who needlessly lost their lives in the famine in India it isn’t.

Spare me the whining about Churchill the imperialist. He was a man of his times, born 1874…”
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Yup. All leaders are a product of their times -like everyone else. Some can see beyond the limits of their prevailing culture better than others. But it’s the extraordinary, heroic things they do that we remember them for.

When it came to Ireland, Churchill was petty enough to refuse to send Casement’s remains to Ireland. The government who followed him, sent them, and Casement got a hero’s funeral in Dublin. Eamon de Valera was there, and his doctors told him to wear a hat because of a cold, and de Valera sais “Casement deserves better than that” and went bareheaded.

I like de Valera. He was a political genius who managed to keep Ireland democratic in an Europe where newly liberated countries fell to all kinds of despotism. Ireland was poor and backwards, but it never knew a dictatorship.

Free advice for conservatives: I sympathize that in trying to make people hate FDR you have a much harder job even than we on the left-of-center who wish more people hated Reagan, but you might as well stop trying to make him authoritarian – it’s never going to stick. (When Purple began his sentence with Churchill’s humanity, I thought he was going to go for FDR’s genial aloofness.)

Separate point: “Out of European recklessness would rampage two world wars” – No, that was German (and Austrian-Hungarian) recklessness. The other side just said “no” when given the choice, “give us what we want or we’ll fight you til we’re both dead.” For which an alarming number of people somehow blame them.

“I really need to stay out of the comment section here. Only took til the second one this time for the Holocaust denial to start.”
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Generally I’d agree, but I’m missing that in the 2nd comment here. In sheer numbers, Mao & Stalin outdid Hitler in genocide & murder victims.
I usually look for the Holocaust denial-type comments in articles concerning the Mideast. It never fails.

I would be more interested on Ralph Raico’s study if his ideology did not blind him. State=bad is his theory, and thus he castigates Churchill for helping build it – and then castigates him for making his peace with communism In the Middle of a War when he needed all the allies he could get!

I wonder if Mr. Raico has any idea of what it takes to win a war, and how did he expect the fascist and communist to let him live in his libertarian fantasy?

A deeply flawed man, Churchill was. But he was needed at the time, and he delivered.

@Hinathan Dandridge : “Trump on the other hand comes into a country whose enemy is within – a moral decay and a totalitarian leaning deep state, a much harder enemy to deal with as he has practically no one on his side except for a significant portion of the American population.”

Is that why he signed a bill authorizing warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens for another SIX YEARS?

Because he’s opposed to “moral decay and a totalitarian left-leaning deep state”?

@mrscracker — “I usually look for the Holocaust denial-type comments in articles concerning the Mideast. It never fails.”

Really? I regularly read Mideast-related articles here, yet I seem to have missed all the “Holocaust denial-type comments” that “never fail” to appear. Or are you referring to Mideast articles on sites other than TAC?

Sigh! According to many, Churchill was responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania, the event which was used to drum up war fever to get the U.S. into WWI. A probable stalemate was then in the offing, but Churchill was not having it. He was an imperialist at heart, and utterly ruthless in furthering his aims. Looking back upon the late 19th and first half of 20th centuries, British imperial policy was to deny German ascendancy, no matter the cost in blood to their citizens and others.

Graham Clark,
As a Christian, I want to first assume the best intentions in anyone’s comments.
But I also believe we have an obligation to not practice willful blindness. That can allow things like antisemitism to flourish.
Weirdly enough, you probably could present the argument that, at least in comparison to today’s norms, Hitler was likely more cultured than we imagine.
Genocidal-ok. He definitely fit that mold many times over.